This easy game is hard

General
1

I know many people complain about the game being too easy. I won’t challenge that, I can admit it’s true… but for who?

I’m a relatively new player. I purchased the game in January, I played a bit more than 600 hours, I leveled around 30 characters and respec’ed some of them several times. I’ve done many tests, asked many questions, listened to many advice. I also helped people, which forced me to clarify several aspects of the game and better understand them. Overall, I feel really involved in the game and really willing to deep dive into it.

That said, I find it hard. I leveled around 30 characters, but only three times I finished the campaign without dying. With a Paladin, a Sorcerer and a Forge Guard. Maybe one other more, but I’m not sure. Even if I know the campaign well, I still make errors. Because sometimes I have slow reflexes, or I lose track of my mouse pointer on screen, for example.
But even when dying, the campaign is relatively easy. There is a difficulty increase after the Immortal Emperor, the Wengari couple is a real challenge and Lagon’s Isle is another difficulty increase, but even with that the campaign remains relatively easy.
The real difficulty comes after, in the monoliths. The first echoes are not much harder, but progressively our build is being challenged. And I’d say the real difficulty starts after defeating the Abomination, when entering another timeline. At that moment, you better have a decent build. Not a good one yet, but at least decent.

And that’s my problem: it’s very difficult for me to create good or even decent builds. Call me dumb maybe, even if I don’t think so. But most of the builds I create are OK for the campaign and for the first timeline, but become not efficient after. I don’t know why. Maybe the whole picture (passives plus skill nodes) is too wide to have an efficient overview and see all the synergies. Maybe I’m too limited for this aspect. I have IQ a bit higher than 130 and I successfully passed the MENSA pre-test, so I would guess I could understand all this, but it seems not.

So that’s why I say the game is hard. To be more precise, it’s hard for certain kinds of players (which I am part of) and easy for other kinds. And I don’t know what makes us part of the “skilled” or “non skilled” ones.

So yes, the majority is probably right, the game is easy. But don’t forget that for some people it’s hard. And I think it should not become easier. Getting to Empowered is doable even for me (with one only char at the moment, and not one of my own builds) and I think Empowered should not be for everyone. Empowered Monoliths are a real gear/skills/player check. If one of these three elements is failing, you will not be able to play in Empowered timelines.

So next time you think how easy the game is, please have one thought for us, poor low skilled players who do love the game, want to continue playing it, and find the difficulty totally appropriate.

TL,DR: even if considered easy by the majority, for some players the game is hard because of either poor personal skills (slow reflexes, etc) or difficulty to create efficient builds, so let the difficulty as is, don’t make it more difficult.

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2

I think you have an IQ related thing going by being honest about the difficulty of the game.

EZ is sometimes just a bit of a meme. Some parts of this game are hard, for as far as I’ve experienced.

Also playing through the storyline and doing it deathless are very different levels of challenge.

You wrote an honest and kind post and I very much appreciate it. Thanks.

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3

True, but consider the amount of people playing in Hardcore mode and leveling heroes very high in this mode! Sometimes I feel very small. ^^

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I too am often awed by how great some players are at a game. No reason to feel small (sometimes I do, though, honestly), but life is not defined by a singular skill or challenge :slight_smile:

Let’s learn from them and improve!

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Always learn and improve in all domains!

2 Likes
6

my advice is to never forget your resistans. always try to focus on it to have the caps at least. bigger damage numbers are always fine, but dieing every 2min sucks. i feel it was a good option that the abo drops a unique item, that gives you 100crit avoidence, cause that what the most people lag when they start with monolights until they reach 70 for the helmet and chest. prio #1 is res and a good hp pool, crit avoidence and endurance should be the next. dont forget that the enemies dont have enrage timer, so you have all time in the world to kill them. when you feel ok, you cant start min max your gear for dps :wink:

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While i agree with your overall statement, that defense is important.

Resistances in LE are not as superior as in other simialr games.

Resistances are just another defense layer.

Getting some resistances is definitely very good and usefull, but you don’t even have to cap them to make them good.
In fact, more often than not, focusing on other defensive layers is better when you already have some resistances.

Resistances are just one of many defensive layers.

Having very good dps, can be “saver” in alot of situatiosn though, especially when you get overwhelmed by alot of mobs.

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i only want to say with that, you dont need to play a class canon to one shoot everything. you also can play it normaly :wink:

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I get that, but i am a bit disappointed, that most players try to explain other players with the “cap resistance example”…

New players can easily get the impression that resistances are the most important defense layer, which is simply not true.

This game gets compared so much with other similar games and people assume stuff works the same in LE, than in other games, but that’s not the case.

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Even if that’s good advice, it’s not what I was talking about.
Of course my resistances are capped. And my endurance is relatively high, with a comfortable threshold most of times. Stats and resistances have very little to do with poor reflexes. A hit that we avoid is far better than a hit that we mitigate.
And also, the resistances, endurance, etc, have nothing to do with the capacity to see the synergies between skills and passives, the ability to understand/calculate which nodes will be worth investing and which ones won’t, and so on.
Reducing the game to “be protected” is somehow leading people to forget all the rest and to forget than Last Epoch is about creating efficient builds more than about being a damage-mitigating punching-ball.

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Yeah I didn’t realize this at first, and found it super interesting when I looked into the math of resistances in LE vs PoE. I’ll use an incoming hit of 1000 and contrast 50% vs 65% vs 75% resistances in both games to attempt to demonstrate.

  • If we look at PoE math first:
    1000 * (1 - 0.5) = 500
    1000 * (1 - 0.65) = 350
    1000 * (1 - 0.75) = 250

The interesting thing with this kind of math is that although each % point mitigates the same amount of damage, the % difference of each additional resistance point to the final damage taken increases as you get closer to 75%.

350 / 500 = 0.7 = 30% less damage by adding 15% resist = 2% less per resist

250 / 350 = 0.714 = 28.6% less damage by adding 10% resist = 2.86% less per resist

With LE, each resistance point added has a much more linear effect on damage taken, because of the resist shred done by enemies.

At enemy level 50: 50% = 0%, 65% = 15%, and 75% = 25%
At enemy level 75: 50% = - 25%, 65% = - 10%, and 75% = 0%

  • Level 50 enemy doing 1000 damage
    1000 * (1 - 0) = 1000
    1000 * (1 - 0.15) = 850
    1000 * (1 - 0.25) = 750

850 / 1000 = 0.15 = 15% less damage by adding 15% = 1% per resist
750 / 850 = 0.882 = 11.8% less damage by adding 10% = 1.18% per resist

  • Level 75 enemy doing 1000 damage
    1000 * (1 + 0.25) = 1250
    1000 * (1 + 0.10) = 1100
    1000 * (1 + 0) = 1000

1100 / 1250 = 0.88 = 12% less damage taken by adding 15% = 0.8% per resist
1000 / 1100 = 0.909 = 9.1% less damage taken by adding 10% = 0.91% per resist

I still tend to max resists, perhaps just out of habit, but the math really highlights why it is not as important in LE as some other games.

2 Likes
12

I really liked your post and i agree with you that every individual has their own feeling and perspective to the game.

No one should feel small or bad, everyone has different gaming backgrounds, strenghts and weaknesses so its not same line to all.

We have nice community where is these very talented players who help us if we ask help.

My tip;
But overall i try to get knowledge beside just playing Epoch. I just found out that every defensive mechanic (i apologize if its wrong term) is good and its best to have many as possible and work on your character/Build strenghts. Dont just focus on resistance or only Ward, its meant to have many as possible and high as possible. And i personally just tried figure out my build/character weakness and piece by piece tried get better defensive value to that spot which was lacking. Worked for me. :slight_smile:

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I wish it would for me, but most of times I can’t even find a build that has real strengths. ^^’

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lol. Really bro?

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I wouldn’t say “as many as possible”, but you will try to invest into 2-3 different defensive layers for most builds.

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Id say the campaign and normal monoliths with the exception of 2 or 3 bosses are fairly easy/straight forward for alot of builds BUT;

Its like POE, you can only do the endgame with a handful of builds b/c the rest get absolutely destroyed in empowered timelines with multiple nasty modifiers stacked.

Ive only enjoyed empowered timelines on 2 builds myself, 1 of Lizardirl’s Paladin builds, and the super meta Novaboy Mage build. Every other character ive tried them on has been a horror show.

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It’s definitely more tricky to get builds to work smoothly in empowered monolith, if you don’t have enough experience and empowered monolith is definitely meant to be difficult.

But i think neither PoE nor LE are they way you describe.

Even in PoE, you can make everyskill run smoothly on almost any content, it’s jsut that people want the top of the top builds… even though that’s not necessary.

But IMO LE is way more balanced in terms of best vs. worst skills.

LE is very good balanced, you can make everything work.

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Thats one way to put it. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, i think Resistances are easy to focus on because in other games they are like most important thing. Dunno why other defensive layers dont get so much visibility. And i dont mean that they are hidden or not explained. I liked when i figured it out, it was “lightbulp moment” and it felt good. :smiley:

20

The experience you describe is so similar to mine.

You can read tooltips, figure out synergies between skills and passives and so on. At one point you hit a wall and think “wtf! why? it was all going so well until now!”

It’s not only to figure out synergies but also to get to know how to use these synergies efficiently. The sweet spot is important.

For example it is one thing to know how to scale bleed damage. Its:

  • bleed chance
  • bleed duration
  • bleed efficiency
  • physical damage increase
  • attack speed

But with limited stat slots what is the best way to scale it? Focus on all stats equally? What’s the most important stat? Is AS more important than bleed chance? How impactful is bleed duration?

The ‘pro players’ have figured out all this stuff. They did the math in theory and tested it ingame. Without that knowledge you can still build a good bleed char that can get through most monos. But at some point theres a wall (more or less hard) that you can only overcome with tweaking the max out of your synergies.

I played ward builds in my starting time when it was op and Lizard dominated the ladder with a Soulfeast Ward Lich. I can’t recall correctly, I think the could have about 80k ward. My Lich lvl 70 could barely generate 3-4k ward and it was just pure rocket science for me how to get that amount Lizard was able to get.

With all the synergies of different stats and mechanics there are also certain thresholds that start to take off only if you can get certain amount. The damage scaling is not linear during your character progression. Early levels everything you do has little impact to the damage. It feels like doing more because the content is scaled that way. But the further you go the higher all those numbers get when the flat values get higher and the increased and more modifiers get more impactful.

I’ve seen a lot of people struggling with their damage output because they had massive modifiers but were using a lower level base weapon without flat prefixes. It’s obvious that you need flat base damage to scale your damage with increased and more. But LE surprises people (also me when I started) with how important the flat values are, due to the skills base damage being so low.

TLDR: It’s not only about ‘knowing’ how things interact and synergize, but also how the synergizing stats are weighted. Without doing the math, you need a lot of trial and error. Or you strictly follow the build guides of people that have figured out stuff, already (or copied it from others that did :wink:).

I 100% know how you feel :grin:

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